A Close-Up Look At People Who Matter : Teacher Excels at Language of Learning

First she winced, then Bertha Tedeski-Izquierdo smiled as one of her advanced-placement students wrote the wrong Spanish word on the board.

Tedeski-Izquierdo, advanced-placement Spanish teacher at John F. Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, knows what it is like to stumble in a new language. She left Cuba in 1959 as Castro came to power, knowing only written English.

“I knew the language, but I was afraid to talk,” she said. As a new immigrant in Chicago, she once asked a stranger, “Sir, do you have time?” She likes to tell her students the anecdote.

“They get a kick out of that, because they think it’s funny,” she said. “Then, they don’t feel so bad about their mistakes.”

Her good humor and warm teaching style make her popular with students.

“She has a lot of patience,” said Aida Pelayo, a former student who visited Tedeski-Izquierdo recently. Pelayo watched as her former teacher ran through a series of exercises, games and student versus student competitions meant to reinforce proper grammar, word usage and accent placement.

“She never gets mad,” Pelayo said. “She never gets frustrated.”

Pelayo, 18, of San Fernando and a student at Cal State Northridge, said that Tedeski-Izquierdo helped her save on college tuition. Pelayo said the Kennedy High class prepared her for passing the advanced-placement exam in Spanish, which enabled her to receive college credit.

Tedeski-Izquierdo’s current class of about 30 students will take the advanced-placement test at the end of the school year. In the five years that Tedeski-Izquierdo has taught the course, at least 90% of her students have passed the exam. Of 27 who took the 4 1/2-hour test this year, only one failed. All passed in 1993.

Pelayo said she knew she was going to pass once she saw the test. It was all familiar.

“One part of the test is an essay,” said Pelayo. “She used to give us an essay to do every week. I think that helped.”

Pelayo said her goal is to also become a language teacher.

As her mentor Tedeski-Izquierdo teaches the class, a student assistant marks papers in the corner. Students have to rewrite a phrase correctly whenever they make mistakes on an assignment. Even native Spanish speakers do not always do so well in the class, sometimes because they have picked up bad habits in the United States.

“The language you hear in the streets is not really Spanish,” she said. “It’s really Spanglish.”

And the Spanglish--using elements from English--is sometimes learned from childhood.

“They think they know it,” she said. “It’s hard to tell them they are wrong.”

But when Tedeski-Izquierdo started at Kennedy 20 years ago, she also relied on her students to help her continue to learn English.

“The students would help me with pronunciation,” she said, and they developed an agreement: “ ‘You teach me Spanish and I’ll teach you English.’ They had fun with that too. And that way, they didn’t see me as a know-it-all person.”

From the start, she had hoped to be at Kennedy a long time. “I felt like I was home for good,” said Tedeski-Izquierdo, who keeps photos of her four children and four grandchildren under the glass top of her desk. “They make you feel like you’re important and they want you here.”

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